Not many people are familiar with how flexible and shareable your NetNewsWire / NewsGator subscriptions are, so I thought it was time to elaborate a little and play with Automator again.

First on our sharing list: the ability to embed an automatically updating list of your NetNewsWire / NewsGator subscriptions into your website or blog. To enable this, simply sign into your NewsGator account (if you're using NetNewsWire 2.1.x or 3.x I believe you automatically get at least a 1-year NewsGator subscription) and go to Settings > Edit Locations. Assuming you have syncing with NewsGator enabled, you should see at least one location related to your NetNewsWire feeds which should have a 'Blogroll' option listed. Clicking on that will give you all the options you need to embed a small snippet of code in your site to create a list of the subscriptions you want to share publicly.

There is another way to share your NetNewsWire subscriptions in a handy-dandy file format, easy for friends, family and visitors to download and import into just about any newsreader they use, including NetNewsWire, Google Reader and even Vienna (this is technically referred to as an OPML file, with the extension .OPML). NetNewsWire offers a File > Export Subscriptions command, but there are a few options involved and this isn't very automation-friendly. If you want to make your subscriptions available to, for example, website visitors or simply back them up on a regular basis, I put together two very basic, two-step Automator apps (packaged as zip files) that can work fine on their own or easily be incorporated into larger workflows.

Safari2OPML is a handy utility that can export your Safari RSS feeds to a fairly standard OPML, good for importing into virtually any other RSS reader. I say 'virtually' only because, in my RSS travels, not all readers digest OPMLs alike. Even Safari2OPML's page at FreeSMUG (Free OpenSource Software Mac User Group) lists some of the top readers and whether this OPML will play well with them. For bonus points, Safari2OPML works with Growl to let you know when the export is a success.

Safari2OPML is donationware and available from FreeSMUG.


[via Pimp My Safari]

Scott posted on endo yesterday, and today I am happy to report that NNW has gone to that giant "poof" in the ex-Dock sky. Sure, endo has some minor "it's a 1.0 release" quirks, but this is the newsreader I've been waiting for. After putting it through its paces last night I was happy to dethrone NetNewsWire's place in my Dock, and here's why.

First and foremost is NetNewWire's age. Version 2.x is old, and it's starting to feel like it hasn't been touched in a while, possibly due to it's dominance in the newsreading market or the NewsGator buyout. Now I don't mean any disrespect; Ranchero is a great company and NetNewsWire both initiated me into and carried me through the newsreading market for a couple of years now. endo simply feels like it pays a little more attention to the market and is aiming to evolve with it, as it offers some really slick integration and headline organizing options. Headlines can be added to a del.icio.us account right from within endo, without the need for snarky applescripts that make me leave the app to do the actual bookmarking in a browser.

On the topic of feed management, endo is very customizable, with the ability to set refresh rates for each group and/or feed (and disabling them altogether) and even the ability to colorize particular feed's headlines so they're easier to pick out in a crowd. endo also offers a Growl-like notification system, toggled per feed, that allows you to sift through snippets of new headlines and short summaries while leaving endo minimized or even hidden. The headline column on the left is also quite tweakable, as summaries and tags can be displayed in-line with the headlines, or you can completely turn off both of those items as I have in my screenshot. To round up the feed management angle: for all those times when you can't get online, endo has the ever-obvious "offline" option.

MacOSXHints has a simple trick for creating an OPML file, completely with folder structure/groups, from your RSS feeds in Safari. The tip basically involves downloading an XML stylesheet the author created, and using it in a Terminal command to generate the OPML file.

I'm glad someone found a way to put this together, but with the open standards and portability of RSS and newsfeeds, I think it's kinda bad form on Apple's part to not have baked this ability into Safari already. Nevertheless, MacOSXHints has come to the rescue, yet again.

This tip was posted by Nathan Nutter at his blog, but it is so simple and useful that I thought it would make a great TUAW tip. Firstly, this tip requires that you have the latest version of iTunes, since this is a new feature.

Let's say you have subscribed to a bunch of podcasts in iTunes, and you are underwhelmed with the management features and you want to move your subscriptions from iTunes to some other podcatcher or newsreader. You might think that in order to do this you will need to resubscribe to all your podcasts, but nay that isn't the case. You can export your podcast subscriptions as an OPML file, which is the industry standard for subscription lists, and import them into any newsreader or podcatcher that supports OPML (and all the good ones do). Here's how to do it:

1. Make sure you have 'Podcasts' selected in the iTunes source list
2. Go to File > Export Song List...
3. After selecting 'Export Song List...' you will get a save dialog with an option to choose where to save the file, the name of the file, and the format.
4. Change the format to 'OPML'
5. Click save

Now all your podcast subscriptions are in one file ready to be whisked into a new podcatcher.